Category: people

“‘John’s remarkable achievements inspired generations of mathematicians, economists and scientists,’ the president of Princeton, Christopher L. Eisgruber, said on Sunday, ‘and the story of his life with Alicia moved millions of readers and moviegoers who marveled at their courage in the face of daunting challenges.'”

“How has Bird been able to get away with labelling the majority of his audience inferior cogs who are only impeding their superiors? Being a legitimately brilliant director helps.”

“I teach Dante to American undergraduates, and I struggle to convey to them his place in Italian culture. The obvious comparison is to Shakespeare, but this is like trying to make sense of Mozart by means of Coltrane: the number of centuries that divide Dante from Shakespeare is practically as large as the number that separates Shakespeare from us.”

By the time we get to Shakespeare, a lot of logic has been sidestepped. And now we really do enter Dan Brown territory. Starting from the heraldic tradition of the “sign of 4”, he embarks on a series of elaborate moves involving Latin and coats of arms to produce the name “Shakespeare.”

“I think that we may be turning a corner away from what I think of as takedown culture. It all comes from cynicism, the feeling that the system is corrupt and that everything is rigged and nothing is what it seems. We all love a good critical catfight, but somehow, with these catfights and cynical demonizations becoming the way of mainstream media, I perceive the wider culture and the art world slowly trying to separate out and isolate this behavior for what it is: Headline-grabbing, grandstanding, gasbags, people scared of change, or afraid of going deeper.”

Maria Abramović has crossed a line that even Jeff Koons and Damien Hirst are wary of. Someone was bound to do it eventually. She has not just taken art out of the gallery but into a realm of rock concert hysteria and teen adulation. To put it kindly, you can say her fans resemble the star-struck kids in old films of the Beatles. But what is the cultural price of mass intoxication? Is it a good thing?

Mr. Lundvall’s career in the recording industry encompassed more than half a century, with success across multiple genres. Blue Note had been an important jazz label for decades but had been dormant for years when he revived it under the umbrella of EMI Records in 1984, intent on celebrating its legacy while moving forward.

“Basically what I’m proposing is the idea of using performance-enhancing drugs in education,” Leon Ewing told the Australian Broadcasting Corporation on Wednesday. “We already prescribe amphetamine-like medication for focus and docility. What if we medicated for creativity?”

“I can’t imagine any reason why Shakespeare would be in a botany textbook,’ he said, adding: “I don’t think very many people are going to take this seriously.”

In his poetry, he explored “the competing imperatives of self-annihilation and self-preservation; his yearning for his father, who abandoned the family early; his labyrinthine struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction and manic depression; and his eventual, cautiously hopeful passage out.”